Three soldiers, bound together by a single terrible event in the final days of the First World War, and a scheme to stun an entire country.

Wounded and traumatised by their wartime experience, Albert Maillard and Edouard Pericourt return from the fighting on the Western Front and find themselves struggling in a society where reverence for the dead can never erase the revulsion for those who survived.

But the marbled halls and smoking rooms of the rich and powerful will soon be reeling from Maillard and Pericourt's fitting choice of revenge: an audacious plot to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale. Meanwhile the third soldier, Henri d'Aulnay Pradelle, is pursuing the hand of a wealthy heiress and plotting a certain scam of his own.